photo by Collyn Ware

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Did you know that the Titanic had a sister ship?” my grandson, Griffin, asked. “Did you know that lots of the dads and grandfathers died because they let the moms and kids get on the lifeboats first? And did you know that there’s a Titanic museum in Branson?” He looked up at me in earnest, waiting for my response, eager to tell me all he’d learned about the Titanic. His curiosity about all-things-Titanic was simply too much for the confines of his morning of online schooling. It was foaming over the top of our prescribed daily lessons as if it were a carbonated beverage shaken up and finally upcapped. There was no stopping it.

But truthfully, who would want to stop the ardent curiosity of a 7-year-old? As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, this raw curiosity is a most useful gift. From my experience as both student and teacher, it is certainly the foundation of most genuine learning. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher wrote:

Learning is by nature curiosity… prying into everything, reluctant to leave anything, material or immaterial, unexplained.

I hated to tell Griffin that we had to turn our attention towards his online social studies lesson about maps because it was all too clear that he wasn’t at all interested in maps right now. Today, he could barely contain his insatiable curiosity about the Titanic. If I could have loaded him up in my car and driven him 6 hours south to Branson, Missouri, I would have earned the title of Best, Most Amazing Grandma in the World. I would have been golden and could have rested on these laurels for weeks–maybe years–after our visit to the Titanic museum. If I could have harnessed his curiosity towards learning, the world may have tilted on its axis! At the very least, the morning would have flown by.

Working with Griffin has made me painfully aware of how traditional schooling has failed students like him. In traditional schools, we are required to teach language arts, math, social studies, science, physical education, art, and music to 2nd grade students. As such, we could never afford to spend an entire morning studying the Titanic. No time for such single-subject luxuries! And we could never afford to spend too many days studying the Titanic. Too much to cover in a year!

For 40 years, I was a public school teacher. I understand–all too well–the curricular and instructional expectations and requirements of any given day of school. If your curiosity and interest is peaked by something, you probably have, at best, 40 minutes to satisfy it. Then the bell will ring, and you’ll be off to the next class. I understand the challenges of letting every student pursue those things about which he or she is most curious. That would mean, of course, that each of your 25 students could conceivably study something different. Juggling this many instructional balls would require more courage and stamina than I ever had. And so, I did the best I could to make a one-sized-fits-all curriculum as palatable and relevant as I could. As do many teachers.

Still, working with Griffin has made me really think about many things–things I’ve known for a long time and things I’m just beginning to understand. I’ve known that the vast majority of my high school and college students had lost most, if not all, of their passionate curiosity years before I ever had them as students. Most were compliant enough, anxious to know just what they had to do to pass. Some wanted better grades, but few were actually willing to do much thinking or investigating on their own. Their curiosity had died roughly about the same time they stopped playing on the playground equipment at recess. From this point on, their educational lives were more about figuring out what the teacher wants than passionately pursuing any natural course for their curiosity.

In Walden Two, psychologist B. F. Skinner writes:

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.

This tendency to explore, to take curiosity’s route to its glorious destination, is wiped out. Sadly, we are the restraining forces, those who wipe out the kind of curiosity that fuels Griffin’s days. We do it in the name of educational efficiency. We do it in the name of tradition and, paradoxically, in the name of progress. Perhaps most tragically, we do it because we can’t see any other way. Having lost our own curiosity, we can’t imagine educating our youth and young adults in new and different ways.

Polish-born American writer and social scientist, Leo Rosen, claims that while many people use the term idle curiosity, [t]he one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle. Being curious is an active and interactive venture. There is a real sense of urgency about it, a compulsion to learn more, to solve problems, to discover how and why things work as they do or why things happened as they did. It requires that individuals invest themselves in the study of something, and that as they do, they shape and use the information they find to answer questions and draw conclusions. Curiosity requires this kind of give-and-take, which makes it utterly impossible to remain idle. For this reason alone, we should pay it more heed. Most of our students have grown flabby with mental inactivity. They have been idling too long.

Currently, Griffin’s synapses are firing wildly, ignited by curiosity. If he follows suit, in a few years these synapses will have burned out. I’d like to arrest time, to stoke the synaptic fires as long as possible, prolonging the innate curiosity that drives him and other children. I’d like us to find ways to ensure that our schools are not restraining forces that wipe out curiosity. I’d like us to imagine a society of more curious individuals, those who aren’t satisfied to idle through their lives, consuming only what they need to pass, to make it through each day.

If we are to do this and if we truly value the kind of thought and innovation that comes from this type of curiosity, then we are going to have to do better. I don’t have all the answers, but I can imagine a world in which there are more educational choices and more incentives to embrace curiosity in all areas of life. The very thought of a world like this is just about as exciting as it gets.